by Holly Lisle
Energy filled the tree-circle—the same eerie, inaccessible energy that had dragged the exploratory team off course and made their airbox crash. The clearing was the heart of it—birthing place of a maelstrom of power. Medwind centered herself and reached out magically; she tried to touch it—and as before, the power slipped out of her reach.
She bit her lip, frustrated, and studied her two guards surreptitiously. I’ll fight without magic, then, she thought. I’ve done that before. But she knew she’d never fought magic without magic.
No sense worrying. Brooding about the things she couldn’t change would only waste her time and her energy, and keep her mind from more productive avenues of thought. She worked at the rope that bound her wrists until she was free of it—the trick of clasping her hands together when the Wen tied her worked well enough. She held onto the rope—she decided she’d better look the part of the helpless captive.
And then, free and disguising the fact, she studied her options. The Wen tagnu might consider dying bravely to be a virtue, but winning and living to fight again were the only virtues in the Hoos world of war.
So Medwind Song concentrated on tactics for the coming battle. The terrain in which she would have to fight was a flat, mud-floored basin, ringed on all sides by a circle formed of nine ramets of the largest baofar tree she had ever seen. Baofar genets, the whole of the organism, were usually comprised of hundreds of trunks and could fill an entire valley, but the trunks, the ramets, were quite slender, with thousands of delicate white strands of silk that hung from their bark to the ground and blew in the breeze. In the place of that silk, these ramets of the baofar were the width of row houses in Ariss, and in place of fine silk they grew heavy white limblike palps that writhed unnervingly. She eyed the bloated tree’s trunks and its engorged palps with distaste.
It’s done well, she thought, on a sacrificial diet.
The only way out was the way they’d come in—through the single opening in the circle of trees. Beyond that point, the village became a maze of tree-branch walkways and under-branch paths—one of which would take them out of the accursed Wen village. Medwind had no idea how she could negotiate her way through that maze, but she would concern herself with that problem only when it presented itself.
Inside the circle, about sixty of the Wen observers in their gaudy silks clustered near the exit. She would have to go through them—if she could get past the gods-bedamned guards who held her and her friends—and past the priests.
The guards had knives. She knew how to deal with knives.
The priests carried no visible weapons—they were, no doubt, protected by magic. Therefore, even if she could kill her own guards quickly—and take out as many of the others as she could—she would still probably fall to the priests. She would probably die there, she thought—and the rest of the attack would be for nothing. She tried to think of another strategy.
Then the baofar spoke. Give us our offerings, it drummed. We hunger.
All Medwind’s plans shattered. She stared at the Keyu, horrified. In spite of everything the Wen kids had told her, she had not been able to think of the trees as her enemy. She’d kept believing her problems would come from the people.
She stared at the priests, for one wild instant hoping that somehow one of them had done that thunderous drumming.
But no. The tree had spoken.
The tree was alive with magic. Now that she knew where to look, she could sense the power of the monster baofar, locked into its multiple ramets and buried roots and intertwining, low-hanging, branches; coursing through its twitching, groping white palps; signaling its hunger into the air.
We have to fight that? she thought. Without weapons, and without magic?
Despair overwhelmed her. She could win against humans—and even a hundred humans, she thought, could fall to a sufficiently angry Hoos. But a tree? A giant tree? What in the hells…?
Then one of the Wen carried Kirtha up to the biggest of the baofar’s ramets, and it didn’t matter anymore what she could or couldn’t do. She dropped the bonds on her wrists and snapped her arms out and up into the throats of her two guards. While they were still disoriented from the surprise attack, she pulled both into reverse headlocks. She snapped the neck of the first man—it didn’t break cleanly. He fell, convulsing, and Medwind’s stomach knotted. She hated to kill—she hated even worse to do it messily. She made sure the second man died quickly, with one clean snap.
One of the onlookers saw what she was doing and shrieked. Heads turned in her direction.
She caught the second man’s knife as he fell and started to run toward Kirtha—and suddenly the drumming stopped, and Kirtha said, “Bad tree,” and the palps of the baofar ramet that held her burst into greasy yellow flames.
Medwind stared at the little girl, tracing the path of the magic in her mind. She’s touching the tree. Using its own magic against it.
Then the tree threw the child out of its grasp, and pandemonium erupted in the clearing. One of the Wen priests shouted “Demons! Demons! Throw them all to the Keyu!” The drums throbbed to life, and the guards ran at the trees, dragging the rest of the exploration party and the weird-looking green-striped girl with them.
Medwind ran at a tree herself. There was no time to give the rest of the group instructions. No time, in fact, for anything but running, being caught in the slimy hard embrace of the Keyu, and—
All around her, in the physical world, she could hear the screams of terrified people and the madness of the drums. For the briefest of instants, she focused on the people she loved—the people she hoped to save.
Then Medwind let her mind connect with the mind of the tree. She made the tree’s structure a part of herself—let its roots become her feet and its branches her arms—and made its magic her own. And when the accumulated magic of the baofar coursed through her, she circled it back into the tree in the shape of fire.
Heat built around her while part of the tree-voice murmured,
The tree tried to fling her away as it had Kirtha, but Medwind held on. She kept forcing the tree’s power back on itself, kept burning the huge baofar—
The tree changed its tactics. It wrapped its palps around her face and secreted masses of viscous white slime, dripping it over her eyes and nose and mouth. The stuff stuck and hardened almost instantly, and Medwind began to suffocate. She hacked at the palps with the dead guard’s knife, but the knife got stuck in the goo, and her hand with it.
Her lungs, deprived of air, burned. She clawed at her face with her free hand, and that hand, too, stuck to the secretions.
Linked to the tree, dying, she mindscreamed into the void that reached out to envelope her—
Help me!
* * *
Choufa heard the drumming start. With her eyes closed, she could follow the progress of the peknu along the sacred paths to the tree-circle. They glowed like torches, the peknu—she and her fellow sharsha were nothing but glow-bugs in comparison.
The Keyu would be pleased, she thought. No doubt the peknu would make tasty treats for them. The last ones certainly had.
She sat alone on the branch. She wanted to be alone—Thedra was going to the Keyu, too. When the trees began to feed, they would draw Choufa in, and she would share their feeding with them. Against her will, in spite of herself, she would share the moment of her f
riend’s death and the hopeless knowledge that soon she would die in the same manner.
And now, too late to tell Thedra, she knew the secret. It would not have made any difference, but she thought Thedra would have wanted to know. Choufa had felt the moment when the girl birthed and noted a sudden brightening of the glow that came from her—and a new, faint glow that came from her newborn baby. Thedra didn’t gleam with the brightness of the peknu, but she came very close.
That is the secret, Choufa thought. The Keyu like us even better after we’ve had babies. So we have to have babies, who grow up to be new sharsha—and the Silk People tell us that having babies is the only way we can hope to be free. That way, they always have someone to feed the Keyu.
The Silk People’s lies infuriated her, but her fury had no teeth.
She stretched out on the platform of woven branches and closed her eyes tighter. It was starting. The Keyu thoughts began to pull her in.
She felt them hungering, reaching out toward the smallest bundle of light; felt them wrapping their coils around it; and with a sudden shock, felt it merging with them—hearing them as she heard them.
The Keyu crooned their pleasure.
The little peknu was frightened—and angry. It touched the Keyu with its mind, and Choufa felt it change something, felt it take the strength of the Keyu and twist it using all that power to burn the Keyu who held it.
Yes! she thought. That’s it! The little peknu isn’t as strong as the Keyu, but she is strong enough to turn the Keyu’s power back at it. Even I am that strong, I think.
The voices of the Keyu cut off, replaced by a mindscream that started in the Keyu circle and spread—spread through the trees around her, and out in a circle to the edge of the village. Fire it burns fire is burning us fire! some of the Keyu screamed, and Choufa felt the Keyu that held the smallest of the peknu fling it away from itself.
Choufa crowed. Again, littlest one! she thought. Burn the evil gods again!
But the littlest peknu was out of their grasp and not vicious enough or angry enough to do what needed to be done—and the Keyu put out the fire she’d started, and began to clamor for other, safer meals.
The babble grew louder and more strident in her mind, and Choufa felt the Keyu wrapping themselves around all of the peknu—and Thedra.
One of the peknu fought, and for a moment Choufa again sensed the God trees burning. For a moment, she believed the peknu might win. Then, though, the Keyu did something to the peknu, and her thoughts grew weak and dim, and she thoughtscrearmed a plea for help, and grew still and silent.
No, Choufa thought. No! They have to fight the Keyu—the peknu have to win.
She threw aside her caution, and willingly embraced the thoughts of the trees, became a part of them, traced with her mind the branching channels of their power until she reached into the source of their strength—
—and then she twisted the power back and stung the gods with their own might.
She pulled some of the power to herself. She used it to touch the peknu who was locked in the Godtrees’ embrace and turned the dripping, sticky raw tree-silk that covered the woman’s face into dust. The woman took a long, shuddering breath, and then another. Burn them now, Choufa urged. Kill the Godtrees.
She moved away, pulled more strength to herself, and touched the minds of the tree-voices that called out against the slaughter. Burn the Keyu, she begged. Help the peknu. And the rebels among the Keyu cried out
The Keyu turned against themselves. The God trees fed power to the peknu and stole it back; pulled power from each other; set fires to themselves, put the fires out. Choufa, linked to the Godtrees, felt the pain of burning almost as if it were her flesh that burned; she heard the confusion that raged in the minds of the Keyu and reveled in it. She made herself concentrate on touching the rest of the peknu, the ones the trees were busily devouring even as they fought. Fight the Keyu, she urged. Touch the Godtrees, and burn them!
* * *
Roba, wrists still tightly bound, fell hard against the tree when the Wen threw her to it. Her back scraped down the bark—then the tree’s cold white tentacles wrapped around her and dragged her toward a split in the base of the tree that widened into a gaping black maw. She struggled. The tentacles gripped tighter—sticky and horrible.
Then the tree devoured her.
The tentacles tossed her into the maw and released her, and again she fell. The maw snapped shut with a loud “clack.”
For an instant, she lay in something soft and dry—something that felt to her like a mattress of spiderwebs. There was no light. The noise outside was muffled—she could hear the screams and the drumming and the shouting, but all those things sounded very far away. The air inside the tree was moist and musty, laced with a feint, sickly-sweet reek of decay.
She struggled to her feet, fought again to free her wrists, and again failed. The stuff she stood in gave beneath her, so that she had to fight to maintain her balance. She peered around the inside of the tree, trying to find even one detail she could use to orient herself, but the darkness was absolute. She took a cautious step forward, lost her balance, and fell.
Hopeless, she thought. There is nowhere to go inside a tree. She worked at her bonds anyway. It was something to do.
She became aware of a soft rustling that came from all around her. The sound was so slight—so trivial—that even once she’d separated it from the louder, horrible sounds outside the tree, she didn’t attach any importance to it. At least, she didn’t to begin with. But the soft, whispery sound—so like folds of cloth brushing against each other—grew in importance the longer it continued.
She managed, after some squirming, to catch the knot at her wrists, and for a long moment, with her hands twisted awkwardly, she worried it between her fingers. She kept at it even when her hands cramped. The knot loosened, then unraveled. The rope fell away into the darkness, and her hands were free.
She pushed herself to her feet—an easier task this time. With her hands held in front of her, she moved forward a finger’s breadth at a time. Around her, above her, behind her, beside her, the rustling continued. Soft whispering. Faint susurrations. Something there.
She bit at her lip until the taste of her own blood filled her mouth. She crept forward over the soft material that shifted with every step she took, fighting to keep her balance in the featureless dark. She fell—once, twice—and climbed up to edge forward again. Her outstretched fingertips touched something soft—damp and cold and sticky—something that moved when she touched it—something that reached out and wrapped around her fingers in a chilly, slimy embrace—
At the touch, she heard voices in her head. She felt wet, probing thoughts sliding through her mind, groping.
She pulled her hands back and pressed them to her mouth. The mindvoices vanished. Her heart pounded. She dropped to her knees and crawled; away, she hoped, from whatever it was that had touched her.
The whisperings in the dark grew louder.
Something soft and wet draped itself across the back of her neck—a gentle touch, feather-light. She brushed at the spot and her hand caught on a sticky, stretchy tendril, thin as spider-thread. She pulled the tendril off her neck, but it stuck to her hand. She pulled it off with her other hand. It stuck to her fingers. In the meantime, another light, wet touch brushed her back. Before she could pull away, several more of the tendrils attached to her arms and her legs. The tendrils brushed her cheeks and tugged at her breasts. She swung, fists clenched, and hundreds of the tiny, gluey threads caught her arms in m
id-swing and held them.
An instinct for self-preservation made her keep her head down. The space around her was thick with threads that caught and covered every bit of her body they could reach. They clogged at her ears, covered her back and the backs of her arms and the bottoms of her feet in a solid mass. With her head down, at least she had breathing room.
The mass of threads began to tighten—gently at first, and then with more insistence. They dragged at her, pulling her upward. She tried to straighten her legs, but couldn’t. She was careful not to struggle too much—the hellish tenacious mass would suffocate her in an instant if she gave it a chance.
Then she bumped against something soft and yielding. She dragged past it, bumped something else, dragged past it as well, and came to rest with her back pressed against slime. She felt a quick, burning sting at the base of her spine, then tingling and numbness at the spot, and suddenly the voices were with her again.
<—will help we will kill! burn! kill! us-them-us! I don’t want to die better to die than to live this way die free die we will die! Free!> the voices clamored.
She felt the same stinging and numbness along the bottoms of her feet, which pressed into the goo, and in her shoulder blades, and along the backs of her arms, which were spread out high and to either side of her. She would have screamed, but she didn’t dare.
The decaying stench grew stronger. Suddenly she caught a feint whiff of smoke, and cutting through the mindbabble, she heard a familiar authoritative snarl. Center on the trees as if you were grounding to them. Then pull magic from them, and turn it back on the stekkonks. Burn them!
Medwind! Roba thought. The Hoos warrior was alive somewhere in the mess and fighting. Roba followed her instructions and found, to her amazement, incredible power within her grasp. She shaped it carefully and burned into the tree that surrounded her——and screamed. Searing white-hot agony ripped through her body, as if she were the one on fire.
